59 Republican Lawmakers Could Face Jail Time Over Fake Elector Plot

59 Republican lawmakers from the local and state level could end up facing jail time for their involvement in schemes to send "fake" electors from their states, according to current and former prosecutors. As more and more information becomes available about the plot, it seems increasingly likely that charges will eventually be filed against some of these individuals, and those charges can't come soon enough. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to both current and former prosecutors, the 59 Republicans, most of whom were lawmakers either at the state or local level who proclaimed themselves to be the alternate electors for their state for Donald Trump could be facing very serious legal consequences, all of which come with pretty significant jail sentences. So here's what's happening in case anybody has not been following along with the news for the last few weeks, we know that multiple different states states that Biden won by a smaller margin of victory than other states, uh, had a plan in place and they submitted these forged or erroneous. If you wanna not dabble into the legal world of it, uh, reports to the national archives and to Congress saying that, oh no, no, no. Trump actually won our state. So here in this, a second part of it that gets overlooked are our alternate electors that we are sending to Congress on January or sending to the electoral college.

Sorry. Anyway. So 59 state level Republicans signed on to be these alternate electors with these essentially forged documents. And let's be clear there wasn't only 59 of them. There was actually a lot more, but luckily some of them had enough good sense to put a caveat into their claim, to be the electors that said, we're only doing this in case Trump prevails in court with his legal challenges, claiming all the voter fraud. If he doesn't prevail, we're not the electors. So those folks are actually not facing any serious criminal penalties because of that simple caveat in the state of Georgia, however, where they had, how many, um, 16 electors they're trying to argue that. Oh no, no, no. We meant of obviously only if, uh, Trump is successful in his legal challenges, but they didn't put that in the document. Nope. And because you didn't put it in the document, you are all now facing potential criminal activity.

Again, these are all elected Republicans at some level in their states. We're not talking about yahoos off the street. We're talking about people who knew better people that knew what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyway. Here are the real numbers, 16 from Michigan 11 from Arizona 16, of course from Georgia, as I mentioned, and Nevada had six. So that makes up of course the 59. You also had five in New Mexico, 20 in Pennsylvania, but those were the two areas where they put the caveats in that said, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is only if Trump is successful. Well, according to former prosecutor, Glenn Kirchner, as he said, uh, uh, for the Huffington post, the potential federal crimes include forgery obstruction of an official proceeding conspiracy to commit fraud. And because the material was sent to its recipients via the postal service mail fraud, the more serious of the offenses carry prison terms.

As long as 20 years, nobody's gonna go to jail for 20 years for this. Honestly, I'll be shocked if any body even goes to jail at all, should they? Yes. I mean, those are the penalties. What they did was wrong, whether they knew it was wrong or not, they still did it. It's against the law. I have no problem with sending these people away for 20 years. That wouldn't bother me one bit. They deserve it. But what about those at the top? This came from the white house. This plan to send these alternate electors was actually laid out in that John Eastman, COO memo, Donald Trump's own white house went on Fox news. Steven Miller aid to Donald Trump went on Fox news and pushed. This said, uh, as we speak in alternate slate of electors to in the contested states is going to vote and we are going to send those results to Congress.

This wasn't just that the Trump white house knew about it. They, they, they were actively promoting it. Steve Bannon was promoting it on his podcast. They knew what was happening and they knew that this could potentially be illegal. I have to assume they knew, at least it could potentially be illegal, but whether or not they knew was irrelevant, they still did it. So in addition to holding these 59 Republican state officials, uh, accountable for it, it's time to put the big dogs in jail for it too.